


And Other Things Karin Would Rather

by Tozette



Series: Soulmate AU Challenge Fics [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-24 10:43:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8369245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: Karin’s soul mark reads YOU ARE AN IDIOT in old-fashioned looking brush strokes, jagged and rough like it was done in a rush, dull red-brown on her wrist, trailing vertically down to the bend of her elbow.She’s seen less auspicious soul marks. Not many, but some.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic's pairing was given to me by AO3 user Phoenixyfriend. 
> 
> Part of the writing challenge I've imposed on myself over on tumblr. If you wanna check out what I'm up to, you can find the rules [over here on my personal blog](http://tozettewrites.tumblr.com/post/152004964326/soulmate-aus-writing-challenge-to-myself). I think the most important thing to know is that it does mean that anything posted as a result of the challenge is _unedited_. There's your heads up. :P

Karin’s soul mark reads YOU ARE AN IDIOT in old-fashioned looking brush strokes, jagged and rough like it was done in a rush, dull red-brown on her wrist, trailing vertically down to the bend of her elbow.

She’s seen less auspicious soul marks. Not many, but some.

Orochimaru’s soul mark is long gone, so much dust with the rest of his original body, but there’s a rumour that it once said PLEASE, NO, TAKE ME INSTEAD. Karin is nearly certain he’d give an honest answer if she asked, but... there’s a chance he’ll say yes. She doesn’t ask.

Suigetsu’s says DO YOU HAVE A FUCKING OFF SWITCH? and when Karin finds out she asks him how he _really knows_ he hasn’t met his soul mate yet, because, _well_.

Sasuke’s is a surprising I WILL ALWAYS TAKE CARE OF YOU and -- 

“Did you ever meet them?” she wonders, once, in a lonely moment of ill-advised honesty between them. The writing sits below his collarbone, which makes it hard to hide -- especially in the loose clothing he wears now, for ease of transformation.

He touches it self-consciously. For a long moment she thinks he’s not going to respond, but then finally he grunts. “Yes.”

He doesn’t elaborate and she’s not dumb enough to push. Whoever it was isn’t taking care of him anymore, obviously... which is probably fair. Sasuke sort of defies taking care of.

Probably his soul mate is dead, anyway.

In the scheme of soul marks, ‘You’re an idiot’ is pretty damning. Karin looks at it when she can’t sleep sometimes, jagged writing beneath old bite scars. It’s like her poor decision making skills are so intrinsically part of her character that they had to be printed on her skin for everybody to see.

Karin doesn’t encounter her soul mate. She’s ten, twelve, fourteen, older and -- slightly, she thinks -- wiser, more scarred, more cynical, and still she doesn’t meet them. Nobody walks up to her and declares that she’s an idiot.

“They say it’s a guarantee,” she says to Kabuto once. His mark is on his shoulder, creeping up his throat. It says I’M SO SORRY. She’s not sure if that’s better or worse than hers. Marks are such a defining thing, and it's hard to carry some of them without bitterness. “But is it really?”

By fifteen she’s progressed to helping him with vivisections, and she’s seen a lot of soul marks. Some are kinder than others. None of them say idiot. She saw a woman’s body with ‘you’re beautiful’ printed on it once.

Kabuto adjusts his glasses, catching the light ominously with their lenses. He has to do it with the heel of his hand and his wrist. His fingers are bloody. He looks sideways at her. “Almost,” he says with surprising certainty. "Circumstances tend to conspire to ensure the meetings."

“Hm." She glances at her wrist. That's... she's not sure what she thinks of that.

“You’re young,” says Kabuto.

She is, for a person. But not for a ninja.

Of course, next week one of their experiments goes horribly wrong and Karin gets slurped up by a bizarre portal. It's a big tear in the world with reality leaking out all around it, colours bleeding from the sky like fleshy fruit stuck in a blender. It grips her tight and closes right after her.

Karin finds herself alone, ill-prepared and stranded. And cold. She has no idea where she is, but it’s colder than she’s come to expect.

The natives are unfriendly.

Karin’s earliest attempt to ask for help -- or at least directions -- gets her tied up. It goes downhill from there.

She’s held by a bunch of yellow-eyed, white-haired crazy people. They’re all clearly of the same stock and almost all of them are ninja. They don’t live in a proper village, but rather in a semi-nomadic series of camps and wooden lean-tos -- primarily, she thinks, because moving entirely strikes them as a better idea than cleaning up after themselves.

They call themselves Clan Shi, which... well, she never sees it written. It's just a name, anyway. The whole camp of them seems, from what Karin can gather, to have an uncommon physical strength and complete immunity to genjutsu -- some kind of weird bloodline limit carried down alongside the yellow eyes. They don't know anything about ninja villages.

The idea makes them nervous. Nervous and suspicious.

They want to know about her village, except nothing she can tell them matches their understanding of the area, or of technology, or of what’s even possible in terms of inter-clan cooperation. To them Karin looks... dishonest and best. Or crazy. Either way, very suspicious.

It's one of Karin's worst weeks.

Three of them hold her face under water until she starts breathing it, let her up just enough to choke up the water and get a breath in, then shove her under again. It doesn't help them answer any of their questions, because Karin's answers aren't meaningful to them.

They threaten her with -- with all sorts of things, anyway. Strip her naked. Search her. Put their hands on her. Pinch and grab and wrench. They like the soft parts best. Of course they do.

She vomits water until her eyes tear and her throat burns and her voice can't come out anymore, spewing oceans and oceans across her captors' boots and over the bucket. They shove her face back in and make her choke on it again.

(There's a small part of Karin that sneers at this businesslike, inefficient torture. Orochimaru is better at it. Their technique is sloppy. It's a small part, but it's there, sneering. She's sure she could do a better job and the thought makes her laugh on the inside. It's not happy laughter.)

Clan Shi puts her in a prison on wheels, still wet and freezing. It’s a dim iron cage mounted on a wagon, covered in animal hides to confuse her sense of time and keep her from the sunlight. It wouldn’t actually be that hard to break out of, except that her lungs hurt every time she draws a breath and she’s weak and stupid with fever. Karin thinks she might have pneumonia to go with her cracked ribs. That would be... bad.

Her fever dreams feature a lot of thoughts and fantasies of Sasuke rescuing her from that stupid bear. Except the bear has yellow eyes and bone-white hair, and increasingly it carries a bucket in one huge clawed paw.

Stupid brain.

Karin is alone and stranded, though, so if she needs rescuing, she’s going to have to do it herself...

...Is what she’d like to say, but it’s not that simple.

The locks on her cell aren’t the problem. They’re old-fashioned and crude and Karin could probably spring them with her thumbnail. It’s that she’s on a wagon, surrounded by the rest of the camp. There are no walls and very little privacy, few shadows to hide in -- even if she picks a time when they’re mostly asleep, there will be a couple of sentries with a clear line of sight to the wagon. The slightest disturbance will alert them, and then the whole camp will be up in arms. Literally, in arms. Karin isn't a front-line type. She does not like her chances.

She’s not getting much stronger, either, not after her fever breaks. From there it’s all prison rations and privation. She’s got a lot of endurance and she recovers fast, but she knows she’s only going to feel worse the longer she leaves it.

There must be distractions sometime. She gives it another night, listening and waiting, and then another, and then ---

She's there three days, and she plays up her sickness -- not hard -- and hopes they think she's too delicate to question again in the meantime.

Something has to happen, or else she’ll just have to break out and run. Karin can’t beat them all in a fight, but she’s one of the best sensors on the continent -- well, on her continent, anyway, god knows where she is right now.

The point is: she’s good at getting away, if not at front line fighting. If she can make a clean break and get out, she can evade pursuit like a pro.

She tries to listen in to the voices outside her cage, but the animal hides are a surprisingly effective muffle. The dialect isn’t quite the same, either, although she can communicate if she tries. It sounds... slang and old fashioned, simultaneously. Connotations are different. If she wants to be understood she has to speak formally, with as much precision as she can.

It happens then: Outside her prison there’s a crash and a clatter, grunts of effort, a cry of pain; the hard fleshy noises of a brief but violent taijutsu battle.

She winces at the meaty thump and breathless grunt that sounds very much like somebody losing all his breath to a vicious kick in the guts.

"--alone," somebody says, and there's dragging, closer, closer.

"-turn from a job, probably-," says another voice.

It’s far too close to her little cell to take advantage of the distraction, unfortunately. It's only minutes before the hides are pulled away and another body is shoved unceremoniously into the cage.

This one's bigger than her, raw-boned but broad in away that says he's not quite finished filling out, dressed in what was probably once armour.

This one Karin knows.

Or, well. No.

She recognises him. She doesn’t know him. And the only reason she recognises him is because where she comes from, there are actual statues erected to Uchiha Madara.  

It's surreal. Karin could have posed it to Suigetsu in a game of ‘would you rather’. Would you rather be trapped in a cage with Uchiha Madara or be eaten over the period of a week by hungry fish? Would you rather be trapped in a cage with Uchiha Madara or a live tiger? Would you rather--

The point is: Karin is pretty sure _she would rather._

He might be dazed and injured now but sooner or later he'd come to his senses and Karin doesn't want to be anywhere near him when it happens.

“Hey!” she yells out at her captors, springing up as tall as she can in the cage, full of energy after days of feigning illness. She grips the bars and ignores the slumped, highly recognisable, completely terrifying person in her cage. “You can’t leave me in here with him! HEY!”

One man gives her a foul look through his swelling eye. There aren‘t any bodies, but there are two other seriously wounded ninja.

“You,” sighs the slumped, way-more-conscious-than-he-initially-seemed body in the cage behind her, in a low, nearly inaudible voice, “are an idiot.”

Karin can feel the dizziness wash over her as the blood drains from her face. No. No, no, no, _nope_.

Her protests get wilder.

In the next three seconds Karin freaks out and decides that whatever this says about her -- whichever terrifying, awful thing this reveals about her personally -- she doesn’t have to have it. She never has to acknowledge that he's gone and said those words to her.

Karin shuts her mouth with a click of teeth and doesn’t respond to him. Whatever words he has on him, they can’t be spoken if she remains silent. No speaking, no soul mate. Ta da.

The yellow-eyed sentries get tired of her yelling.

"Seems like her lungs have recovered," murmurs one to another, and they share a guffaw before they pull the hides down and block out most of the light.

Madara gives it a few minutes and then, when the normal sounds of camp more or less resume, he unrolls from his 'woe I'm injured and helpless' foetal curl.

He's not, Karin thinks, very injured.

There mustn't be any sensor worth his skin in this camp, either, because they obviously can't feel the shifting chakra in the west.

Karin thinks she remembers trees that way, which is good cover if you can get it. Good cover if you're waiting for an attack signal, just for example. Ambush from the forest is a time honoured tactic of Konoha-nin, although...

With Madara right here, stretching out his limbs and feeling cautiously along his bruised ribs in the reddish dimness of their too-small cage, Karin is forced to suppose Konoha doesn't exist. Yet.

He's way younger than his monument down at the Valley of the End. Late teens, maybe early twenties if he's particularly baby faced, but she doubts it.

He glances at her. He's obviously aware she's watching. He doesn't smile. His eyes are black from the iris in.

They sit in silence. It's close. Uchiha Madara cocoons himself in his hair, leans against the iron bars and radiates body heat like a breathing and very dangerous kind of furnace. It's the first day in the cage that Karin's been more tense than bored or sick. She counts the flickering chakra to the west. Two, four, six-- a seven man cell, with Madara right here.

It's pretty obvious what's going on here. It’s risky. The sort of tactic you use when there’s not enough manpower to do the job any other way. It’s easy to miss without a good sensor, especially if Madara sold it well. Especially if the Clan Shi is arrogant about it. Karin thinks they will be.

When night falls and the encampment settles the smells of rich cooking rise on the air. Madara eyes the lock, turning it over in his hands with a minimum of rattling. Four signatures are encroaching from the west, two circling around. She can feel them coming, and swallows. She thinks it’ll be a blood bath. She’s -- she’s pretty sure. Bloodbath.

Two of the guards come to take Karin from the cage, come to take her back to questions without answers and more water over her head. She chokes, she vomits, she is shivering and cold. It goes on for some time.

They dump her back in the wheeled prison with bile and blood in her hair and a crack in her glasses that is somehow significantly more annoying than anything else they’ve done so far.

Madara makes a gesture toward her neck once they’ve left again, and Karin flinches back.

“Still alive, then,” he says with a sniff, pulling his hand away, and seems to dismiss her entirely.

She coughs up a lungful of water and spits it out on his shoes. It’s not intentional, but she’d be lying if she said she was sorry.

Karin closes her eyes and drifts for a time, and she barely rouses herself when the sounds from outside the cage go soft. Dimly she’s aware that the chakra signatures are close, closer still, easily within a mile of the camp.

There’s a bright flare from one to the west, and Madara begins to move. Karin hears the lock open with -- not his thumbnail, maybe, but there’s plenty of room for hidden things in his hair. He times it to her coughing to cover any noise, which is sort of clever. There’s a soft hissing noise as the hides move, the flicker of firelight against her half-closed eyelids.

Then the firelight gets brighter. And _brighter_.

Somebody bellows an alarm, and over it, Madara laughs.

The screams start then, and the chakra signatures come streaking toward the camp, ready to take advantage of the mayhem.

Everything is on fire, and Karin’s lungs are weak and vulnerable. She inhales smoke, coughs, cramps up wildly,  and promptly passes out.

Somewhere a very great distance away, a voice is talking. From the tone and cadence, she thinks it’s swearing.

“--zumaki, maybe?” asks a second, more reasonable voice, and there are hands on her again, freezing against her skin.

She reaches up, grabs one wrist, and wrenches it until she hear a yelp of pain and feels something give.

The swearing is a lot louder by the time she pries her eyes open, although it’s a different voice this time.

The teenager clutching his wrist and glowering at her is pale with big dark eyes and flawless angular features.

“Sasuke...?” she gets out. There’s a brief, intensely hormonal moment where Karin is pretty sure _Sasuke has come to rescue her,_ having somehow figured out how to replicate the sky-eating portal that brought her here with his sheer unrivalled genius.

Then she blinks. She could smack herself. Of course he hasn’t.

He blinks too. “Sarutobi?” he says. “You think I look like _Sarutobi_?” A pause. “I-- I think I’m insulted?” He sounds unsure.

“What?” Karin frowns. She tries to breathe deeply but it hurts and doesn’t get her very far and she ends up wheezing instead. She levers herself up on one elbow, leans sideways, and coughs wetly for a few long moments. Her next indrawn breath rattles.

“She’s probably half-blind,” snorts Madara, speaking at a proper volume now. He’s holding onto her glasses, still cracked in one lens, and he holds them out without her asking.

The wires are thin and the firelight is inconsistent. She has to squint to grab them.

Only when Karin gets them on does she realise she’s not in the camp of her captors -- she’s surrounded by seven bright-burning chakra signatures, all belonging to lean, quiet people with dark hair and dark eyes, and she can’t feel one of the Shi Clan’s signatures in any direction.

The trees are bigger here, way bigger. Karin blinks. “You carried me?” she asks incredulously -- because what kind of ninja carries an unconscious maybe-enemy of no particular information value into the heart of his own team’s camp? “Here?”

Madara’s eyes narrow, sharp and assessing and so intense she feels scorched with it, and next to her the littler one makes a strangled noise.

“Of course,” says Madara. His mouth curves minutely, although there’s still something dangerously intent about his expression.

He rolls back one sleeve and --- Karin remembers. She remembers why she wasn’t going to say anything, why she --

“When else was I going to hear somebody say that?”

Her writing is stark and glossy black on his skin, on the inside of his wrist, smudged a little by an old burn.

She puts her fingers around her own wrist self-consciously. Her eyes flick back up to his face, and suddenly Karin can’t bear being on her back in the dirt, can’t stand staring up at him like this. She heaves herself into a sitting position and staggers up to her feet. Nobody stops her.

He twitches but doesn’t move to stop her when she grabs his wrist. Her fingers slide along the mark and she can feel it -- it’s in her gut, in her head, buzzing and obvious. There’s no mistaking it.

He claps his big hand over the writing on her wrist, too.

Karin blinks at the mess of their tangled hands.

His pulse is steadily rising under her touch, and that perversely grounds her. He’s panicking too.

“Sorry,” says the other one, the younger boy she’d mistaken for Sasuke initially, and he pries Madara’s fingers open to peer at Karin’s soul mark.

Then -- “ _Aniki_ ,” he says, despairing. “You _didn’t_.”

**Author's Note:**

> Like something? Weirdly invested in this completely bizarre pairing? Let me know in a comment. :)


End file.
